Multimedia search: ready or not?

America Online (AOL) bought the Seattle-based multimedia search engine Singingfish (www.singingfish.com) from global media and entertainment conglomerate Thomson for an undisclosed sum. However, whether the purchase marked the immediate beginning of the mainstream era for nontext-based search or was instead a long-term gamble in a market still getting used to the intricacies of text-based engines such as Google, remains an open question. From the researchers developing new speech, video, and image search software to workers encoding multimedia files for search engine indexes, industry observers say the learning curve may be steep.